Category Science

On 14 July, 2015, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft successfully flew past Pluto, the icy dwarf planet on July 14, 2015. This was the first time that Pluto and its moon Charon were studied up close. Notably, scientists discovered that Pluto has an adorable heart on its surface. The spacecraft was launched in 2006 with the primary mission to perform a flyby study of the Pluto system.

After the Pluto flyby, New Horizons was maneuvered for a flyby of a Kuiper belt object 486958 Arrokoth (nicknamed Ultima Thule). On January 1, 2019, the spacecraft flew by the icy world which is 6.5 billion km away from Earth. Arrokoth is a contact binary consisting of two lobes attached by a bright, narrow neck, and is now the most distant object humans have ever explored.

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On August 6, 2014, The Rosetta Spacecraft from the European Space Agency (ESA) reached the orbit of comet 67/Churyumov- Gerasimenko. It became the first spacecraft to orbit a comet, and to deploy a lander, Philae, on its surface (on November 12, 2014). But the touchdown did not go entirely as planned as Philae bounced off 67P’s surface twice and finally settled in a shady spot on the comet. It managed to gather a great deal of data about 67P for about 57 hours before its battery ran out due to reduced sunlight at the crash site. On November 15, 2014, Philae entered safe mode, or hibernation. The mission evoked so much interest among common people that farewell message poured in for Philae on social media when the ESA decided to end its mission in July 2015. However, the mothership Rosetta continued to remain in orbit around the comet 67/P until September 30, 2016.

Comet 67P orbits the sun once every 6.5 years, making its closest approach to the sun in August 2015. Since then, the comet (and Rosetta) has been traveling farther and farther away from the sun. The mission has to come to an end soon, as Rosetta’s solar panels will no longer be able to power the spacecraft. The probe is not designed to survive the landing, or even to withstand gravity; at the moment of impact, Rosetta will be crushed and its signal will go dark, ESA managers said. 

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On April 17, 2014, NASA announced the discovery of Kepler-186f, the first Earth-sized exoplanet to be found within the habitable zone of its host star. Kepler-186f is orbiting the red dwarf Kepler-186, about 582 light years from Earth. The star hosts four other planets. However, Kepler-186 b, c, d, and e are not habitable as they are very close to their star. They are considered too hot to have liquid water and to host life. Kepler-186f orbits its star compared to what Earth gets from the Sun. The discovery was seen as s significant steps towards finding worlds like planet Earth.

The four companion planets, Kepler-186b, Kepler-186c, Kepler-186d, and Kepler-186e, whiz around their sun every four, seven, 13, and 22 days, respectively, making them too hot for life as we know it. These four inner planets all measure less than 1.5 times the size of Earth.

The next steps in the search for distant life include looking for true Earth-twins — Earth-size planets orbiting within the habitable zone of a sun-like star — and measuring their chemical compositions. The Kepler Space Telescope, which simultaneously and continuously measured the brightness of more than 150,000 stars, is NASA’s first mission capable of detecting Earth-size planets around stars like our sun.

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On December 1, 2013, China launched the Chang’e-3 lunar rover mission on December 1, 2013. The unmanned spacecraft became the first spacecraft to ‘soft-land’ on the Moon since 1976. The spacecraft entered the elliptic orbit on Dec 10, 2013, and landed on the lunar surface on December 14, 2013. Soon after the touchdown in the Mare Imbrium, a small six-wheeled, solar-powered Yutu rover was deployed and driven across the airless surface. But Yutu stopped moving from December 16. However, its instruments continued to function till March 2015, sending back valuable information about the Moon to scientists.

In the landing sequence, the Chang’e-3 lander is dropped from an altitude of 4 m above the lunar surface which required a cushioning landing system on the lander to create a fairly soft landing. The system also has to support the rover release that is performed after landing. A “cantilever-type” design has been selected for Chang’e-3.

The landing system utilizes four primary landing legs that are equipped with footpads to avoid sinking into the surface. The Chinese used previous lander designs and knowledge on the properties of the lunar dust to develop a landing system that minimizes mass while maximizing stability.

The primary landing struts facilitate bumpers with interior buffer elements to provide shock-absorbing capabilities. The legs are installed at an angle of 30º to the lander structure. Multi-functional and single-functional secondary struts are attached to the landing legs to provide additional attach points to the lander body.

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On February 15, 2013, A powerful meteor broke up over the city of Chelyabinsk, Russia, on Feb. 15, 2013, producing powerful shockwaves which shattered glasses, injured over 1490 people and damaged over 4,300 buildings. The blast scattered meteor shards across the region and left big holes in the ice- covered Lake Chebarkul. Chelyabinsk, as the meteor came to be known, was no ordinary rock. It was a superbolide, an extremely bright meteor capable of exploding in the atmosphere. It entered Earth at a speed of 69,000 km/h and was observed over a wide area of the region. The same day a 130-foot asteroid called 2012 DA14 gave Earth a close shave, missing our planet by just 27,000 km. But the two space rocks are unrelated.

In the next 10 million years, large rock pieces (along with some dust) combined to create an asteroid about 60 miles (100 km) wide, Kring said. This parent body sustained a large impact with another space object about 125 million years after the solar system was formed, with more strikes coming during the “late heavy bombardment” period — a time of frequent small-body strikes that occurred between 3.8 billion and 4.3 billion years ago. Two other impacts have come in the last 500 million years. Closer to the Chelyabinsk event, the parent body experienced yet another impact and was also nudged out of the main asteroid belt into an orbit that crossed near Earth’s.

Initially, the Chelyabinsk bolide was thought to be part of 1999 NC43, an asteroid that’s 1.24 miles (2 km) wide, but the orbit and mineral composition between the two bodies turned out to be different. In April 2015, a study in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society suggested Chelyabinsk had been a part of asteroid 2014 UR116.

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On May 25, 2012 SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft became the first commercial spacecraft to successfully dock with the International Space Station to offload its cargo. The SpaceX Dragon is a reusable cargo spacecraft developed by SpaceX, an American private space transportation company. SpaceX has been contracted to deliver cargo to the ISS under NASA’s Commercial Resupply Services program, and Dragon has been carrying cargo to the ISS on a regular basis since 2012.

On 3 June 2017, the CRS-11 capsule, largely assembled from previously flown components from the CRS-4 mission in September 2014, was launched again for the first time, with the hull, structural elements, thrusters, harnesses, propellant tanks, plumbing and many of the avionics reused while the heat shield, batteries and components exposed to sea water upon splashdown for recovery were replaced.

SpaceX has developed a second version called Dragon 2, which includes the capability to transport people. Flight testing was scheduled to complete in the first half of 2019 with the first flight of astronauts, on a mission contracted to NASA, scheduled to occur later the same year; however, a test pad anomaly in May 2019, which resulted in the loss of a Dragon 2 capsule, has delayed this development.

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